Editor’s Note: There has been an avalanche of important new scholarship on the Underground Railroad over the last twenty years, and yet there remains a critical gap in the literature. Scholars know comparatively little about the slave catchers (or kidnappers) who chased after the fugitives (or freedom seekers). This is a challenge that Maryland historian Milt Diggins has tackled in an important new biography of Thomas McCreary, who spearheaded slave-catching operations along the Mason-Dixon Line during the antebellum period. Teachers and students should know more about such men and their methods and so we asked Diggins to share a post at Blog Divided that would help highlight the main insights of his book, which can be purchased from the Maryland Historical Society or at other online retailers such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Guest post by Milt Diggins

In 2007, while serving as volunteer editor for the Historical Society of Cecil County in Elkton, I came across a nineteenth century newspaper article that caught my attention. Fredrick Douglass referred to “Thomas McCreary, the notorious kidnapper from Elkton.” No one at the historical society had ever heard of McCreary, and apparently neither did anyone else in the county. Ask people to name a slave catcher and kidnapper and many could name Patty Cannon. The story of the infamous Cannon-Johnson gang is encrusted with local myth, but remove the layers of folklore and history will still reveal a formidable gang of kidnappers with a deserved reputation for viciousness. But why did Douglass call McCreary a notorious kidnapper? That question, and the questions that followed, drove seven years of research and writing. Patty Cannon may be better known, but reconstructing the story of the once notorious but nearly forgotten Thomas McCreary reveals him to be a more significant figure for examining the controversy over slave catching and kidnapping.

One reason for McCreary’s historical importance was the time period in which he gained notoriety. Cannon died in prison in 1829. The debate in Congress over the abolition of slavery heated up in the 1830s. The Prigg vs Pennsylvania decision in 1842 proclaimed the constitutional right of slave catchers to capture suspected fugitives without hindrance by state governments, a guiding principle for slave catchers and kidnappers like McCreary. Northern states attempted to provide some protection for citizens of color through personal liberty laws, like Pennsylvania’s, revised and enacted in 1847. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 increased federal responsibility for recovering escaped slaves by authorizing US circuit court commissioners to try fugitive cases. The most violent reaction to that law occurred at Christiana, Pennsylvania, one decade before the outbreak of the Civil War. McCreary operated within this series of events, and his actions were shaped by them. His activities added fuel to the animosity between Maryland and Pennsylvania over the slavery issue and the distinction between slave catching and kidnapping.

McCreary benefitted from the support of his community, adding a second dimension missing in the story of the Cannon-Johnson gang. Proslavery advocates prized his forays into Pennsylvania and his prowess for capturing accused runaway slaves. Local newspapers praised McCreary as Elkton’s hometown hero. The editors defended his “arrests” to counter criticism from Pennsylvanians, and from Delawareans, most notably Thomas Garrett, and the editors of the Blue Hens Chicken, an antislavery newspaper.

McCreary’s relationship with the political elite is a third reason for his significance. McCreary was deeply in debt when the county declared him insolvent in December, 1838. Two months later, the governor appointed him to a state position in Elkton, an indication that McCreary had found favor with Cecil County’s political bosses. In time that local political connection would extend to the state level. These political relationships would work to McCreary’s advantage.

Patty Cannon’s villainy was widely recognized. Opinions divided over McCreary, mirroring the growing national divide. Elevated to the status of state hero, McCreary represented Maryland’s insistence on the unrestricted right of slave catchers to seize blacks in Northern states and force them into the hands of slaveholders. Whereas opponents criticized McCreary’s questionable slave catching tactics and condemned him for obvious kidnappings, proslavery Marylanders valued McCreary as an effective slave catcher. In their view, it was politically impossible for him to be a kidnapper, no matter what the likes of abolitionists like Fredrick Douglass or Thomas Garrett said, or what a Pennsylvania jury might have said if given the chance.

Exactly four years after he had surrendered Fort Sumter to the Confederates, Union officer Robert Anderson returned to Charleston to help once again raise the U.S. flag over the now-ruined harbor fortifications. Following an emotional mid-day ceremony, hundreds of men and women, included dozens of notable figures like abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, gathered on Friday afternoon, April 14, 1865 to hear the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher deliver a commemorative speech from what he memorably called, “this pulpit of broken stone.” Beecher spoke at length about the meaning of the war, offering President Lincoln in particular his “solemn congratulations” for his “disinterested wisdom” during the long conflict and for having maintained “his life and health under the unparalleled burdens and sufferings of four bloody years.” Yet that very night, of course, the president was shot at Ford’s Theatre. Lincoln died the next morning at almost exactly the same time that Garrison had gone with several of the other leading abolitionists to visit the gravesite of the late secessionist John C. Calhoun. The day before Beecher had vowed that “Slavery cannot come back.” Now, standing over Calhoun’s imposing tombstone, Garrison sternly echoed that sentiment by telling his friends: “Down into a deeper grave than this, slavery has gone, and for it there is no resurrection.”

It was yet another one of those unforgettable moments from the American Civil War, and what makes it even more compelling is that we have some amazing photographic evidence of that astonishing trip. The War Department had sent several photographers to help capture scenes from the Sumter events and then from across the devastated city of Charleston. These are all now in the collection of the Library of Congress. Some of these images are famous, and widely reproduced, like the ones of the four black children (in Union military garb) seated by the pillars of the city’s well known circular church:

Other images from that period are less familiar, but still vital for understanding the narrative details of this critical episode. In particular, there is one heavily damaged image, not usually reproduced, but which shows a level of crowd detail from around Beecher’s speech unprecedented in the other images from the series.

Yet that heavily stained image (above), yields this wonderful detail (below), which clearly shows Major General Anderson, seated on the crowded platform itself, casually holding a walking stick, just to the right (our left) of the standing Rev. Beecher, who is tightly clutching the pages of his windblown speech.

Relying on this image and others from the series, we here at the House Divided Project have been busy trying to identify the rest of the notables at the event. Most important, we are trying to figure out exactly where editor William Lloyd Garrison was seated. His best modern biographer, the late Henry Mayer, used a detail from one of the blurrier versions of this image to claim that Garrison was probably the man in the big hat seated a few feet to Beecher’s left (our right), but the quality of this particular detail shows how unlikely that was.

We think it is far more likely that Garrison was this lean, spectacled man, standing here (right) in reflective pose after the ceremony. In part, we believe this man was Garrison, because other images from the event suggest that he was seated behind Gen. Anderson, among other leading abolitionists, such as George Thompson, from Britain (and Garrison’s close friend), and also New York antislavery editor Theodore Tilton. White House aide John G. Nicolay, who was serving as the president’s personal emissary to the event, was also in that section of the platform. Details from some of these images are provided below. We also have some zoomable versions at the House Divided research engine, showing preparations, and two slightly different versions of Beecher’s speech, here and here. The bulk of the images from that journey have been digitized by the Library of Congress, more than two dozen of them are now available online. Check them all out and decide for yourself. If you come across anything important, please offer your insights in the comments section below. If you can, please help us identify any other notables in the audience. We are especially eager to find Robert Smalls, the ex-slave and wartime hero. Newspaper accounts claimed that the ceremony was attended by a mixed race crowd and that Smalls was present and widely celebrated –but we cannot find him, nor actually much evidence of any black presence near the speaker.

According to historian Louis Masur, Abraham Lincoln was “upset” by Union General John Fremont’s decision on August 30, 1861 to announce from his headquarters in St. Louis the general emancipation of rebel-owned slaves in Missouri (p. 28). Yet, in his first letter to Fremont requesting changes in this proclamation, which he sent by special messenger from Washington just a few days later, Lincoln doesn’t sound so upset. He claimed only that two points in the fiery August 30 directive (which had also declared martial law) had given him “some anxiety.” The president dealt with the first matter regarding the shooting of people under the terms of Fremont’s martial law in blunt fashion, saying effectively, don’t do it without my approval, but then addressed the second matter concerning emancipation in a more subtle fashion. He asked Fremont to modify this part of the order “as of your own motion,” so that it would “conform” to the recent Confiscation Act (August 6, 1861) and claimed explicitly that he was making these confidential requests “in a spirit of caution, and not of censure.”

Now this is a good example of how historians have to interpret evidence and how these interpretations actually matter. Masur believes Lincoln was upset because he thinks the Great Emancipator was still adamant in the summer of 1861 that the war was being fought over union and not slavery. That is why Masur claims that Lincoln found the Fremont proclamation so upsetting and “objectionable,” mainly because, as he puts it in The Civil War: A Concise History (2011), the order “violated the terms of the Crittenden-Johnson resolution, adopted by Congress on July 25, which reaffirmed the position that the war was not being fought to overthrow or interfere with established institutions” (28). Yet, Lincoln never mentioned that important (and very conservative-sounding) resolution in either of his two letters to Fremont. Nor did he use the word “objectionable” in his initial communication with Fremont, which Masur does not quote from in his short book.

Jesse Benton Fremont

Yet even in Lincoln’s second letter to Fremont, the one which Masur quotes from, the tone is not necessarily “upset.” Written in response to the general’s September 8th reply to his “private and confidential” September 2d telegram, the president still remained at least outwardly calm despite the fact that the general was stubbornly refusing to do what he had suggested. Fremont had actually sent his wife, Jesse Benton Fremont, an experienced politico herself, to deliver his response to the White House. She did so apparently around midnight on September 10, 1861. There was some kind of dramatic confrontation between Mrs. Fremont and President Lincoln that evening at the White House although its nature has been disputed. Two years later, the president recalled, according to the wartime diary of a close aide, that she “taxed me violently” during their conversation, although much of their argument by his recollection concerned rumors of Fremont’s administrative incompetence and factional politics in Missouri and not either martial law or emancipation (John Hay diary, December 9, 1863). This claim of the president’s is supported by a private memo from another White House aide (John Nicolay) produced just a week after the confrontation which asserted that the “matter of the Proclamation … did not enter into the trouble with the Gen” (September 17, 1861). Years later, Jesse Fremont remembered it much differently, claiming in 1891 that Lincoln was focused almost solely on the dangers of emancipation and had told her: “the General should never have dragged the Negro into the war.” This is not a very credible recollection, but it has appeared in various forms in many secondary sources and presumably helped inform Masur’s outlook. Regardless, what resulted from this unusual collision was a second presidential note, this time for public consumption, in which Lincoln claimed that while there was “no general objection” to Fremont’s August 30th order, on the particular matter of the “liberation of slaves,” there was something “objectionable” about its “non-conformity” with the Confiscation Act. So, Lincoln decreed, since the general wanted an “an open order for the modification” from the Commander-in-Chief himself, that he was “very cheerfully” willing to do so. Hence, the president publicly ordered on September 11, 1861, that Fremont’s proclamation was to be “modified” so as not to “transcend” the government’s official confiscation policy regarding the seizure of Rebel-employed slaves.

And there’s the rub. Some historians, like Masur, consider the official Union policy regarding slavery in the summer of 1861 to have remained what Lincoln had stated (or technically re-stated) in his March inaugural address. In his brief passage on Fremont’s controversial order, Masur writes, “The proclamation itself violated Lincoln’s assurance that he had no intentions of interfering with slavery where it existed” (28-29). Yet for other historians, such as James Oakes, that policy on non-interference had already changed –and had been changing since spring 1861. The August 6th Confiscation Act merely culminated a new wartime policy by Union authorities allowing them to interfere with slavery whenever it was necessary for military reasons. In particular, runaways or “contrabands” were generally supposed to be “discharged” from enslavement, because as the fourth section of the new statute delicately put it, any slaveholder who required or allowed “any person claimed to be held to labor or service” (i.e. his slaves) to either “take up arms” against the United States or to be employed by the Rebel military was to “forfeit his claim to such labor.” It’s not clear from the plain language of the statute that these ex-slaves were to be freed, but that was the practical effect in many cases. This new precarious freedom also applied indirectly to runaways who had nothing to do with the war effort. The War Department had begun issuing orders to field commanders as early as May 30, 1861 allowing them to protect so-called “contrabands” or fugitives from the demands of slaveholders, and on August 8, 1861, the Secretary of War (Simon Cameron) provided a clear directive based on the new law authorizing commanders to protect and discharge not only Rebel-employed slaves, but also runaways whose masters were loyal. Cameron’s letter informed field commanders (in this case, specifically General Benjamin Butler) that they should simply keep records of everyone freed so that later (“Upon the return of peace”), Congress could provide for “just compensation” to any loyal masters whose slaves had been “discharged” incorrectly. Not every Union commander followed this directive in the subsequent months, but more than a few did. The result was real freedom for many ex-slaves. At the end of the year, President Lincoln, in his first annual message, described the policy shift as one that had “thus liberated” an unspecified “numbers” of black people in 1861.

Lincoln and Browning, courtesy of Ana Kean

The interpretative stakes are quite high here. Masur (and many others) explicitly describe the Civil War as one that “began as a limited war to restore the country” (xi) before becoming in late 1862 and early 1863 a more revolutionary struggle for freedom. Yet if Lincoln was not so “upset” by Fremont’s 1861 emancipation decree, but rather more concerned over exactly how to emancipate slaves, then this emphasis on limited war seems misplaced. There was certainly plenty of limited, cautious rhetoric on the Union side, especially from President Lincoln, but the policies on the ground seem far more radical, almost right from the beginning. Yet it is complicated. On September 22, 1861, Lincoln defended his actions in regard to General Fremont in a remarkably candid private letter to his old friend, Orville Browning, now a U.S. senator from Illinois (he had recently taken the seat following the death of Stephen A. Douglas). Lincoln labeled Fremont’s emancipation edict “purely political” and

Copy of Lincoln’s 1861 letter to Browning

denied forcefully that either “a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation.” That sounds quite limited as a policy statement, and yet a smart Civil War student might well ask, isn’t that also exactly what the Great Emancipator himself did just one year later, when he revealed his own emancipation policy on September 22, 1862? With presidential emancipation, he made “permanent rules of property by proclamation.” In his letter to Browning –a must-read for any serious student– Lincoln denied that he had been or would be “inconsistent” and carefully explained to his longtime friend and political colleague the difference between “principle” and “policy” and why some things had to be done in private while others had to be managed in public. It’s a masterful document and one that holds perhaps the key to understanding Lincoln as a wartime political leader.

Noted filmmaker Jake Boritt is coming to Carlisle on Wednesday, May 7, 2014 for a special free public showing and discussion of his latest film, “The Gettysburg Story,” a state-of-the-art documentary about the pivotal Civil War battle narrated by actor Stephen Lang. What makes this film especially unique and cutting-edge is Boritt’s use of high-definition camera-enabled drone aircraft. His innovative project quite literally depicts the 1863 battlefield from a perspective that you have never seen before. You will be amazed at the visual spectacle and fascinated by Boritt’s discussion of how 21st-century technology helped bring to life this classic 19th-century American story.

The Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond uses technology to digitize and present historical data in a way that reveals hidden patterns. The lab consists of eight main projects which present various insights into American history:

Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States

Virginia Secession Convention

Hidden Patterns of the Civil War

Mining the Dispatch

Visualizing Emancipation

History Engine

Redlining Richmond

Voting America

While the data covered by these projects spans all of American history from Columbus to the present, particular focus is devoted to the nineteenth century. Rather than presenting the large-scale, political history which is available in the average classroom textbook, these projects analyze the movements and actions of the common person. The result is a series of new stories about the experience of the average American—white, black, male, female—who worked, migrated, fought, and suffered for their freedom.

The most recent project is the digitized Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, originally drawn up in 1932 by U.S. naval historian Charles O. Paullin and geographer John K. Wright. The print edition of the atlas—which includes over 700 maps on 166 plates that cover American history from 1492 to 1930—has greatly impacted many historical publications even to the present day. Recently for the New York Times, project director Robert K. Nelson explained that “Paullin’s maps show ordinary people making a living, moving across the landscape, worshipping at churches, voting in elections.” This new, digital edition changes the way we can interpret these maps. Each map has been georeferenced and georectified to provide accurate and optimal web-viewing, but the viewer can switch to a high-quality scan of the original plates. The user can also toggle a sidebar with Paullin’s original text and legends, as well as zoom in and out and adjust the transparency of the map overlay. Permalinks save all these preferences and ensure they can be accessed in the future. Series of maps that show progression of movement or activity through time have been animated. For example, the animation of slave populations from 1790-1860 shows the concentration of southern slave power and its expansion westward concurrently with gradual emancipation of slaves in the North. Furthermore, the statistical annotations provided for this map declare the exact numbers and percentages of slaves in each county, and by 1820 provide a breakdown of the slaves’ genders. Some maps are accompanied by additional analytical blog posts. “Vanishing Indians,” by lab director Robert K. Nelson, discusses the atlas’ shortcomings when it comes to portraying Native Americans in their relationships to each other.

The Visualizing Emancipation project is another interactive map which highlights slavery’s end during the Civil War. The map “presents a history of emancipation where brutality is sometimes easier to see than generosity and where the costs of war and freedom fell disproportionately on the most vulnerable in the South.” Users can filter through different types of emancipation events (i.e. African Americans helping the Union, their captures by either army, fugitive slave-related incidents, etc.), as well as different types of sources, including books, newspapers, official records, or personal papers. Like the Atlas, this map is animated, so as the user toggles pins and filters on and off, she can follow the relationship between emancipation and the position of the Union army, or the agency of slaves in obtaining their own freedom. The project also features certain events and figures as starting points for understanding emancipation, with the ability to pinpoint each event on the map. I only wish that there were at least one featured example where a person or group were involved in multiple events, so a user could follow their physical journey using the map. For those teaching emancipation, there is an accompanying lesson plan and worksheet. Students are encouraged to contribute by submitting information they find in primary source documents, since the map, which covers “only a small slice of the available evidence documenting the end of slavery,” could never be complete.

Voting America also makes use of animated maps to show changes and differences in voting preferences for presidential and congressional elections (1840–2008). The key factor is scope, which illuminates different patterns and trends. For example, changing popular votes at the state level show which parties won each election, while at the county level show how each state was politically divided. The dot-density maps are even more democratic, as 1 dot=500 votes in an area; this way, more third-party votes are recorded. For these types of maps, every legend shows important political events in history; so, one can watch the progression of voter turnout since 1840 and note the effect the Fifteenth and Twentieth Amendments had. The user also has the option to view individual elections in each of these capacities. Population maps show the location and movements of black Americans (represented—a bit stereotypically—as black dots) and white Americans (represented by pink dots). Unfortunately there is no option to view these populations together, nor is there any representation of immigrant populations. The project is accompanied by an interactive map which can be used to compare presidential election years, but my computer, running Adobe flash player version 12.0.0.38, was unable to open it. An alternative version is available through Google Maps, but currently this feature is down. Finally, a “Scholars Corner” provides expert analysis by DSL staff on certain voting trends.

Three other projects in the lab focus on the American Civil War. Mining the Dispatch uses topic-modeling, a computerized method of pulling together multiple documents that have the same key words within them. This can reveal interesting categories and patterns among texts. In this case, Nelson ran every issue of the Richmond Daily Dispatch from November 1860 to Lincoln’s death in April 1865. Some of the more interesting topics are fugitive slave ads, anti-northern diatribes, military recruitment versus conscription, humor etc. Nelson juxtaposed line graphs showing the frequency of similar topics, and, tentatively, relationships emerged. This project is still in its preliminary phase and because of its algorithmic collection process, the data is imperfect. Still, it is a good jumping off point for research questions.

The Virginia Secession Convention project seems to diverge from the site’s aim to tell the average American’s story. It seeks to explain the decision of the VA delegates to secede from the Union through their full-text searchable speeches and the Convention’s proceedings. However, as the Data Visualizations page shows, their decisions were likely influenced by their constituents. Each county is annotated with statistics about the constituents: percentages of slaveholders and the enslaved, average farm value per acre, and pro- or anti-Union stances.

Finally, though Hidden Patterns of the Civil War largely highlights many of the projects already discussed, it also includes other mini-projects and tools, like a collection of maps that shows the migration patterns of black Virginians who married after the war, a Google Earth tour of the Richmond slave market developed from a sketch by painter Eyre Crowe, and a full-access digital database of the Richmond Daily Dispatch during the Civil War.

While the two remaining projects are less relevant to the nineteenth century, they are great tools for the classroom. Redlining Richmond maps and annotates the racist categorizations of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (a New Deal agency) in the late ’30s. The assigned value of each neighborhood is based on race and nationality, and shows the lingering effects of slavery in the Jim Crow era. The History Engine is a “moderated wiki” where students generate three-paragraph “episodes” (rather than arguments) about people, places, or events in American history, drawing on local university or online archives and secondary sources. Because registration is required, each submission is carefully screened for quality and accuracy. The project’s aim is to place students from around the world in conversation with each other and their work.

The eight projects of the Digital Scholarship Lab thoughtfully and extensively explore the individual experiences of Americans during the nineteenth century. The Lab’s innovative use of technology illuminates otherwise obscure patterns of growth, contest, suffering, and change. This is an invaluable resource for studying the social history of our nation, and a must for anyone teaching or learning about the American Civil War.